Life with Rona — Day 6
It’s just another manic Monday.
Singapore Airlines has joined Cathay Pacific in slashing 96% of their routes. AirAsia is probably going to ground planes, MAS hasn’t provided a plan, but AirAsia is clear that they can’t even guarantee jobs. I guess we should expect some form of bailouts. Hong Kong just said there was a huge chunk of change for affected airlines (as they have locked down borders too; Hong Kong’s current wave is coming in from foreign imports).
Miss Wong’s in Siem Reap has shut her doors; I used to go there a couple times at least once a year, when I go to build a house for the poor. Siem Reap tourism was already dropping a little last year, so I guess Covid-19 just accelerated the process this year.
Malaysia got an address from the Prime Minister today (we recorded more deaths at 14, a huge spike in cases). He basically said you get stimulus of up to RM500 from your EPF Account 2. So rob your future self, by taking out money today. Sure it will unlock over RM40 billion if all take it out. But really? This is such a bad idea. It is also abundantly clear that many EPF contributors don’t have enough stashed in their Account 2 to even be benefitting from this.
I read a good article about families in low cost flats finding it hard to socially distance themselves (something like 7 people share 600sqft of space). On cable TV, there were interviews of people who live for the day up north, finding it hard to eat more than a meal a day, and now it consists of rice and soya sauce because they’re so poor and the MCO is affecting their livelihoods. I am speechless this is happening to fellow Malaysians.
In further news, we see the Prime Minister say that foreigners (think illegal workers too) will have to pay for their Covid-19 tests; takes DG Hisham to make another statement contrary to that. He seems to be the hero we all need. Singapore has agreed to open source their TraceTogether app (Bluetooth based contact tracing); let us see when the code gets released.
Unifi (Telekoms broadband) is having issues accessing some stuff on Amazon S3. It is clearly affecting my work. Routing issues because Maxis seems to be fine.
Work front, the only thing to say is: So much to do, so little time.
